Feeding Frenzy

What I need is a larger grill. Seriously. If I had a larger grill I could cook for more people more easily. And I'm hampered by not having an oven in the warm months. To cook for eighteen is going to be a trial. I have a couple of weeks to work out the logistics. Borrow someone's kitchen. The convection oven will work for the root vegetables, Justin or Billy can do them in batches and they can be nuked before serving, maybe John Hogan can do the corn pudding at his house, I can use the warming oven at the museum if I have to. Be nice to have a warming oven, have everything ready at the same time. I need to increase the sauce by two quarts, which I'll take care of this weekend, I love working on the sauce; I'm going to cook in a great raspberry chipotle salsa and a verde enchilada sauce, adjust the heat (I'm currently holding a wide variety of ground peppers), and blenderize everything. I've got, some pork fat to seal the top, while it mellows in the fridge. The sauce, jeeze, I can't believe the sauce is still around. But preserving things by covering them with fat is a very old tradition, store them is a cool place, a cave or hole in the ground, and they'll keep for a long time. Crocks of cooked duck or lowly pork sausage, it doesn't matter, you can eat it later, when you're hungry and the squirrels have moved south. Toothsome though a hare might be. Rabbit on a biscuit. For the vegetables, five pounds of either Red or Yukon Gold potatoes, two pounds of young turnips, two pounds of parsnips, two pounds of beets, all quartered or halved to be about the same size, tossed in olive oil, lots of salt and pepper, finely minced rosemary. Six slabs of ribs might be enough. The corn pudding is easy. Cut the kernels from twelve ears of sweet corn, then scrape the cobs with the back of a butter knife to get the juice, a cup of stone-ground corn meal, a cup of ricotta, a cup of half-and-half, six eggs, salt and pepper, a dash of nutmeg, stir it all together, bake for an hour in a heavily buttered pan at 350 degrees (it's done when it doesn't shake in the middle) and this is always a crowd pleaser. I first ate something like this dish in Iowa. In the deep south, which I consider home, we just cut the kernels off the cob, scraped the juice off into a buttered cast-iron skillet, salt and pepper, Fried Corn, it was called. As sweet a treat as I ever required. Need maybe four loaves of garlic bread so everyone could sop up their mess. I assume John would open up the bar, I assume someone would walk me home. Interlude. Thinking about how to get this meal on the table, I actually smell and taste the various particulars. I know what I want the balance to be. Just short of a feeding frenzy. Keep it civilized.